Comment by tptacek
6 days ago
I use Codex CLI for casual stuff, because of the ergonomics of just popping open another terminal tab.
I use Zed as my primary interface to "actually doing project work" LLM stuff, because it front-ends both OpenAI and Google/Gemini models, and because I really like the interface. I still write code in Emacs; Zed is kind of like the Github PR viewer for me.
I'm just starting to use Codex Web for asynchronous agents because I have a friend who swears by queueing up a dozen async prompts every morning and sifting through them in the afternoon. The idea of just brainstorming a bunch of shit --- I can imagine keeping focus and motivation going long enough to just rattle ideas off! --- and then making coffee while it all gets tried, is super appealing to me.
I'm curious how much you paid in the past month for API fees generated by these tools. Or at least what order of magnitude we're talking about.
I don't know, like, weekly coffee shop tab levels of money?
Interesting, I guess the ones I saw complaining about blowing through hundreds worth of API calls per session were just doing something wrong?
1 reply →
> I use Zed as my primary interface to "actually doing project work" LLM stuff, because it front-ends both OpenAI and Google/Gemini models, and because I really like the interface. I still write code in Emacs; Zed is kind of like the Github PR viewer for me.
You're not concerned about OpenAI or Google stealing your code? I won't use VSCode for that reason, personally, but I do use VSCodium.
I could not be less concerned with OpenAI or Google stealing my code.
That's an interesting sentiment, coming from you. Is privacy officially over then? Should I stop pushing my friends to use Signal over WhatsApp?
> I'm just starting to use Codex Web for asynchronous agents because I have a friend who swears by queueing up a dozen async prompts every morning and sifting through them in the afternoon
Bunch of async prompts for the same task? Or are you parallelizing solving different issues and just reviewing in the afternoon?
Sounds intriguing either way.
I _think_ I’m the friend being referenced. I’m parallelizing solving different issues. Basically I keep an internal swim lane of a variety of projects and just kick off the next task in the lane I think the agent can handle.
Then I do my “real” work, there’s the stuff I don’t trust the agent with, or is more exploratory or whatever.
As I think of more agent tasks doing that I write them down. When I take a break, say for lunch or winding down at the end of the day I check back in on previous tasks and fire off the new ones.
My flow is very similar to what I did with junior eng except I’m willing to fire off even more trivial tasks at the agent because I don’t care if it sits idle. Similarly if it gets way off base I’m happy to kill the pr more aggressively and start over, what do I care if it wasted its time or if it learns a valuable lesson from the experience?
Thank you!